


journeys end in lovers' meeting

by katsukifatale (TrumpetGeek)



Series: yuri!!! on zines [6]
Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Baseball, Alternate Universe - Olympics, Character's Name Spelled as Viktor, Confident Katsuki Yuuri, Embedded Images, Fluff, M/M, Supportive Phichit Chulanont, Supportive Victor Nikiforov, it's more of a canon divergence wherein yuuri played baseball instead of doing figure skating
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-10
Updated: 2018-08-10
Packaged: 2019-06-23 07:46:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15601638
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TrumpetGeek/pseuds/katsukifatale
Summary: Matsumoto punches his mitt and spreads his arms wide open behind the plate — a signal for Yuuri to send him his best pitch.So he does.(aka the fic where yuuri plays baseball, viktor skates, and they still manage to find each other).





	journeys end in lovers' meeting

**Author's Note:**

> it's august 9 for me so that means i get to finally post my fic for CHASING GOLD: a yuri!! on ice sports zine. i seriously had so much fun running/organizing the zine with my bff jo and all of our fantastic participants. if you guys have a chance you should check out the amazing fic and art [here](https://yoichasinggoldzine.tumblr.com/) on tumblr or [here](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/YoIChasingGold) in our ao3 collection. 
> 
> also, i'm equally excited to finally reveal that i commissioned the incredible [minatu](https://twitter.com/minahomine/status/980056445948329984) to draw a scene from this fic. i am in love!
> 
> special thank you to sam for her encouragement ;)

 

 

**Tokyo Games, 2020.**

 

 

 

 

 

> _Bottom of the ninth, two outs, no strikes and no balls._

 

 

Matsumoto makes a call, his fingers flicking low and quick against his thigh. Yuuri nods and breathes in deep. The sun prickles at the exposed back of his neck and forearms, warm humidity shimmering in the air above the infield dirt. The air smells like warm earth, and sweat, and passion.

 

 

This is the kind of baseball he lives for.

 

 

Inside his glove he spreads his first two fingers apart, hooking the tips of them over the red stitches.  There‘s no one on second or third so he doesn‘t bother to take his eyes off the Korean southpaw staring back at him from home plate.  Instead he winds up, left leg kicking up high as he tucks his elbows into himself, right shoulder dropping, arm whipping out. His left foot makes hard contact with the dirt and his arm comes down heavy across his body.  

 

 

Four-seem, low and inside, just like Matsumoto called for.

 

 

The batter doesn‘t swing, and the crowd screams and screams and Yuuri‘s tired, shaking muscles scream with them.

 

 

 

 

 

> _Bottom of the ninth, two outs, one strike and no balls._

 

 

The thing is though —

 

 

Yuuri stretches his arm out slow, feeling the quiver and ache in every atom of him. Matsumoto throws back and settles into his crouch behind home, his glove squeezing and opening. He is a steady point on which to focus, but Yuuri still burns with nerves.

 

 

The thing is, the ball feels familiar in his grip and a mound is a mound no matter where you go — that is for certain — but playing here at the Games in his home country drapes an invisible weight across his shoulders. He never thought he’d be here, to be honest. He’d been too young in 2008 and then the twelve years between had been no guarantee, even when the Committee announced bringing the game back in 2020.

 

 

He’d learned that in the most bitter of ways, staring at the dust still rising from home plate, listening to the surge of the crowd and the joyous screams of a team clad in yellow and blue, the debt of years of blood and sweat paid off with Yuuri’s final failure of a pitch.

 

 

He will never forget the silence of his team, the quivering of their mouths pressed in tight lines across their faces, the sight of their sweat and their tears dripping down their chins. He’d wanted so badly to tell them how hard they’d worked, how amazing they were, how proud he’d been to stand with them through his two and a half years of high school — and he was so, so proud. They’d worked so hard to get to that point, that defeat.

 

 

Only, he’d let all of it slip through his shaking, weak fingers.

 

 

An errant pitch had been all that stood between them and the other team, but it had been the difference between a jubilant celebration and scraping dirt into tiny bags to take hom to their parents.

 

 

He never imagined he’d be here, on this mound, representing his country like this. Never thought he’d get to hold an Olympic baseball in his hands, or that it would feel so familiar. Never thought he’d have someone like Viktor watching him and supporting him as he struggled — and it has been a long, long struggle — toward his dream.

 

 

The weight of it is enough to crush him.

 

 

The batter settles into the box and Matsumoto signals another pitch — curveball. Yuuri takes a breath, trying to calm down his racing heart, discreetly brushes his sweaty palms down his uniform.

 

 

God, please, he thinks as he tugs his cap down. He goes into his windup, leg rising up and leaving a trail of dust behind. Please don’t let it end like that.

 

 

The ball slips off fingertips slick with sweat, lands in Matsumoto’s mitt just outside the batter’s box.

 

 

“Ball!”

 

 

Yuuri’s heart thuds.

 

 

 

 

 

> _Bottom of the ninth, two outs, one strike and one ball._

 

 

“Don’t mind, don’t mind,” Matsumoto says when he throws back. Yuuri takes a deep breath, and then another one. He paces the mound for a moment, watching the batter take a few swings out of the corner of his eye. He can hear, faintly, the encouragement of his teammates at his back and, louder, the screams of his countrymen at his front. Somewhere up there, he knows, are his parents and sister, and the Nishigoris, and Phichit, and — he breathes deep again, feeling the air expanding his lungs and settling the acid in his stomach. And Vitya.

 

 

This is fine, he thinks. This is okay.

 

 

He’s been here before.

 

 

After Koushien — after the loss, and the subsequent end of his high school baseball career — he’d been depressed. He’d struggled to find his love of baseball again, and it had hurt him so much more than he ever thought it could, that it eluded him. He’d grown up loving baseball, had gone through his teenage years loving baseball, and had expected to keep loving baseball with the same ferocity and certainty for the rest of his life. Baseball had been part of him, like a strand of DNA built right into his makeup. He’d wondered, then, if this was all he’d have to show for years and years of effort — dirt and dead dreams.

 

 

When all he’d felt was a terrifying emptiness where his love for the game used to be, he’d been scared. Terrified. Felt alone. But the thing is, love alone doesn’t make a person good at or worthy of something. Love alone doesn’t win games, or teach new breaking balls.

 

 

Love is only part of the equation — it’s dedication, and effort, and sweat; it’s hours and hours of grueling practice, and the force of will to keep going when all you feel like doing is collapsing into the dust. Yuuri had worked his entire life for baseball just as fiercely as he’d loved it. Love and work is a marriage.

 

 

So he’d kept at it — kept training, kept throwing, kept dreaming. He’d gone to college in America on the wings of hope. He’d met Phichit, a sweet and boisterous figure skater with an obsession with instagram and moved in with him a year later. He’d met Leo de la Iglesia on the Wayne State baseball team and formed a battery with him. Kept dragging himself up that ladder one rung at a time until, finally, he’d signed a little contract and met the head coach for the Detroit Tigers.

 

 

Somewhere along the way he’d realized that he had never stopped loving baseball — it’s just that, sometimes, love is something painful and heavy.

 

 

So. A failed pitch? He can handle that.

 

 

Yuuri settles and Matsumoto fires off a signal that makes Yuuri’s eyes widen. He stares at his partner, and Matsumoto nods. The corner of his mouth lifts in a smirk and slowly, slowly, Yuuri begins to grin.

 

 

The pitch his catcher asked for is risky — it puts a lot of pressure on a pitcher’s arm because of the motion it takes to execute it properly, but it’s also rare and Yuuri is one of the few people who has it in his arsenal.

 

 

Screwball, huh? Well, he’s always loved a good challenge.

 

 

He adjusts his grip on the ball from behind the barrier of his glove and nods back. He can tell, even beyond the awkwardness of the arm motion this pitch usually generates, that he is slowing down, getting tired. The exhaustion hangs heavily over him like a shroud, but the ball releases perfectly, curving like a shot in toward Seung-gil’s chest.

 

 

Seung-gil swings, but the satisfying sound of a ball cracking into a mitt rings through the stadium.

 

 

 

 

 

> _Bottom of the ninth, two outs, two strikes and one ball._

 

 

“Yes! That’s it, Katsuki!”

 

 

Yuuri’s breath shudders out of him. He rolls his shoulder a little, feeling the ache deep inside him from too many throws under too much pressure. He hurts, everywhere, his body and his mind. His feet are sluggish, his wrist screaming, his fingertips numb.

 

 

He glances up, up, and somehow, miraculously, meets Viktor’s startlingly blue gaze. He’s too far away to hear him even if he yells, too far away to make out any motion of his mouth, but he knows, he knows what Viktor is telling him, like he knows the contours of a baseball and the roadmap of creases in his mitt.

 

 

It’s the same thing he’d said two years ago, the first time they’d met.

 

 

He’d gone with Phichit to Pyeongchang, to support his roommate and best friend, to watch him represent a country he loves with his whole self on the world’s biggest stage for sports. South Korea had been beautiful. The Games had been incredible. Phichit, indescribable. Ice skating is the most elegant and cutthroat sport, Phichit had told him once. Seeing it like that, Yuuri had been inclined to agree. Everyone, men and women alike, had somehow maintained a kind of ethereal grace and beauty while doing the most ridiculous stunts, like spinning four times in the air and landing on one foot. One man in particular had caught his eye, though Yuuri had lost him somewhere amongst all the others.

 

 

In the end Phichit had placed fifth, just off the podium.

 

 

(And, his traitorous brain informed him, the beautiful man he’d seen earlier stood at the top. But that wasn’t Yuuri’s concern.)

 

 

Yuuri had been ready to console him, but Phichit, with his infectious smile and bright enthusiasm, overcame that particular hardship by somehow convincing Yuuri to allow himself to be shuffled off to the Pyeongchang Village for a K-pop concert.

 

 

And then subsequently lost him in the crowd on the way in.

 

 

He’d tried calling but his mobile phone had died after two rings, and Yuuri hadn’t wanted to detract from his best friend’s achievement, so he’d sat himself down on a bench and resigned himself to waiting and trying to keep down the anxiety.

 

 

He was just about to lose that battle when he’d felt the bench shift under someone else’s weight. He’d looked up, wondering if there had been some kind of mistake, and found a sea of blue. It was him, and now that he’s up close Yuuri recognizes the beautiful man for who he is — Viktor Nikiforov, Russia’s skating darling according to Phichit.

 

 

“Um,” Yuuri had said after a few moments of awkward staring. “What —?”

 

 

“Are you lost?” the man — Viktor — had asked him.

 

 

“Ah — ”

 

 

“I’m Viktor, by the way. And if you were lost, you aren’t anymore! I’ll stay with you, so you can either be found or we can be lost together!”

 

 

Yuuri isn’t sure why this moment comes to mind now, of all times, with what is possibly the last pitch of the Games sitting in his hands. It had been probably the most awkward meeting he’d ever experienced at the time, but here they are. Viktor had charmed his way into his life and into his heart, and two years later he’s still finding him all over again.

 

 

Still helping him find himself.

 

 

Matsumoto punches his mitt and spreads his arms wide open behind the plate — a signal for Yuuri to send him his best pitch.

 

 

So he does.

 

 

He winds up, arms over his head and leg raised, and slams his foot down like an arrow, pointed toward home. His hips and chest turn, transferring his strength up his body and into his arm, through his elbow, into his fingertips.

 

 

The ball kisses his fingertips as it flies off toward his partner’s waiting glove — a shuuto, his specialty.

 

 

Seung-gil swings hard, and the stadium holds its breath as the ball slams into the mitt, hovering low and inside and just inside the strike zone.

 

 

“Strike!”

 

 

 

 

 

> _Bottom of the ninth, two outs, three strikes and one ball._

 

 

Just like that, it’s over.

 

 

His sore, tired, shaking body wants to collapse right there on the mound, amidst all the screaming and the raucous joy. It feels like someone’s cut the strings on him, and honestly — honestly — that’s the best feeling there is at the end of a game like this. To know that you’ve given every ounce of yourself that you had to give and then some, to know that you did everything you could — it’s beautiful. It’s so much more than he ever thought.

 

 

This — it’s a moment he never thought he’d have for himself. To stand there on the mound, surrounded by his teammates, knowing that he represented his beloved country, and his friends, and his parents, and himself in the eyes of the whole world. He remembers what it was like to scoop dirt into his sad little sack after his Koushien loss and for a moment he wonders if he should do it here, too, just to say ‘fuck you’ to the memento of his failure.

 

 

(He doesn’t. Koushien dirt is for those who will never make it back; he’s still young, his muscles and bones still strong; he will not miss the mound in 2024.)

 

 

Instead he drags his eyes up again, taking in the exultant faces of the crowd, searching for one in particular.

 

 

Something stirs in him — a question that had been floating at the back of his mind, perhaps. He finds himself running, darting past teammates and South Koreans alike, past the foul line and home plate and dangling cameras. He reaches out and Viktor meets him halfway, leaning over the barrier wall to help him climb up.

 

 

There is no pause — Viktor’s hands find their spots at the corners of Yuuri’s jaw, bringing him closer and closer still. They kiss like it’s being broadcast on live television — full of euphoric passion and tender love.

 

 

“You just won gold, zolotse,” Viktor murmurs against his mouth. Yuuri kisses him again, and again, feeling their smiles growing between them. “I’m so, so proud of you.”

 

 

“Marry me,” Yuuri says in return, fierce and strong in the support of Viktor’s arms.

 

 

“God, yes.”

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> i'm a big baseball fan, like i even played baseball for a while when i was younger, so this au is really special to me and i spent a long time research the right pitches and grips and stuff. i really hope you enjoyed it, because i'm probably not done playing in this 'verse!
> 
> also incidentally some of you might already know this but i just moved to japan about two weeks ago and the area i'm in is reallyyyy close to one of the top japanese baseball teams in the country, the fukuoka softbank hawks!
> 
> you can find me on tumblr at [katsukifatale](http://katsukifatale.tumblr.com/) or at [trumpet-geek](http://trumpet-geek.tumblr.com/)!


End file.
